mkomu - Slashdot User

Comment Cryptographically-based firewalls (Score 1) 414

by mkomu on Sunday May 02, 2010 @12:59PM (#32064756) Attached to: What Is the Future of Firewalls?

I am badly late on this topic, but I couldn't help to comment. Here's a link to public-key based firewall: http://www.usenix.org/event/usenix07/posters/lindqvist.pdf The idea is to ditch IP address-based access control lists in firewalls and to favour public-key authentication to support mobile devices. The approach is also based on end-to-end VPN rather than the popular end-to-middle VPNs. Here's a longer journal article: http://www.igi-global.com/Bookstore/Article.aspx?TitleId=39054

NASA Mars Rover Opportunity Grinds "Cool" Rock 70

Posted by timothy on Friday January 22, 2010 @07:33AM from the dude-that-is-far-out dept.

coondoggie writes "While its sister rover Spirit has garnered most of the attention lately, NASA's other Mars traveler, Opportunity, is chewing up Martian dirt and unearthing the mineral and chemical makeup of the red planet. NASA scientists said this week the rover uncovered 'one of the coolest things Opportunity has found in a very long time:' a dark, basketball-sized rock known as 'Marquette Island.' According to NASA, the Marquette Island rock is a coarse-grained rock that indicates it cooled slowly from molten rock, allowing crystals time to grow. Such composition suggests it originated deep in the crust, not at the surface where it would cool quicker and have finer-grained texture, NASA stated."

OnLive Gaming Service Gets Lukewarm Approval 198

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 22, 2010 @06:07AM from the better-than-lukewarm-rejection-i-guess dept.

Vigile writes "When the OnLive cloud-based gaming service was first announced back in March of 2009, it was met with equal parts excitement and controversy. While the idea of playing games on just about any kind of hardware thanks to remote rendering and streaming video was interesting, the larger issue remained of how OnLive planned to solve the latency problem. With the closed beta currently underway, PC Perspective put the OnLive gaming service to the test by comparing the user experiences of the OnLive-based games to the experiences with the same locally installed titles. The end result appears to be that while slower input-dependent games like Burnout: Paradise worked pretty well, games that require a fast twitch-based input scheme like UT3 did not."

Motorola Takes Android To China, With Or Without Google 42

Posted by timothy on Friday January 22, 2010 @04:39AM from the alternative-paths dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Google's spat with China could affect Motorola as it vies to crawl back into the mobile market, but recent partnerships will allow it to pursue the Chinese mobile market alone. Circumventing the fallout, Motorola on Thursday introduced its own Android app store for China and a deal with Baidu, the leading search provider in China."

Game Developers Note Net Neutrality Concerns To FCC 74

Posted by Soulskill on Friday January 22, 2010 @03:35AM from the game-developers-are-people-too dept.

eldavojohn writes "A list of notes from game developers (PDF) was sent in a letter to the FCC which represented a net neutrality discussion between the developers and FCC representatives. Game Politics sums it up nicely, but the surprise is that developers are concerned with latency, not bandwidth, unlike the members of many other net neutrality discussions. One concern is that each and every game developer will need to negotiate with each and every ISP to ensure their traffic achieves acceptable levels of latency for users. 'Mr. Dyl of Turbine stated that ISPs sometimes block traffic from online gaming providers, for reasons that are not clear, but they do not necessarily continue those blocks if they are contacted. He recalled Turbine having to call ISPs that had detected the high UDP traffic from Turbine, and had apparently decided to block the traffic and wait to see who complained.' It seems a lot of the net neutrality discussions have only worried about one part of the problem — Netflix, YouTube and P2P — while an equally important source of concern went unnoticed: latency in online games."

Nokia To Make GPS Navigation Free On Smartphones 300

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 21, 2010 @07:50PM from the las-vegas-effect dept.

mliu writes "In what is sure to be a blow to the already beleaguered stand-alone GPS market, Nokia, the global leader in smartphone market share, has released a fully offline-enabled free GPS navigation and mapping application for its Symbian smartphones. Furthermore, the application also includes Lonely Planet and Michelin guides. Unfortunately, the N900, which is beloved by geeks for its Maemo Linux-based operating system, has not seen any of the navigation love so far. With Google's release of Google Navigation for Android smartphones, and now Nokia doing one better and releasing an offline-enabled navigation application, hopefully this is the start of a trend where this becomes an expected component of any smartphone."

Microsoft Patches "Google Hack" Flaw In IE 142

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 21, 2010 @05:40PM from the you-saw-this-coming dept.

An anonymous reader writes "As expected, Microsoft has issued an out-of-band security patch to address a remote code execution hole in Internet Explorer that was used in the recent Chinese attacks disclosed by Google. Ars Technica has all the download links you need."

MIT Offers Picture-Centric Programming To the Masses With Sikuli 154

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 21, 2010 @05:21PM from the mind's-eye dept.

coondoggie writes "Computer users with rudimentary skills will be able to program via screen shots rather than lines of code with a new graphical scripting language called Sikuli that was devised at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With a basic understanding of Python, people can write programs that incorporate screen shots of graphical user interface (GUI) elements to automate computer work. One example given by the authors of a paper about Sikuli is a script that notifies a person when his bus is rounding the corner so he can leave in time to catch it." Here's a video demo of the technology, and a paper explaining the concept (PDF).

Researchers Pooh-Pooh Algae-Based Biofuel 238

Posted by timothy on Thursday January 21, 2010 @04:56PM from the feed-it-pooh-pooh-undies dept.

Julie188 writes "Researchers from the University of Virginia have found that current algae biofuel production methods consume more energy, have higher greenhouse gas emissions and use more water than other biofuel sources, such as switchgrass, canola and corn. The researchers suggest these problems can be overcome by situating algae production ponds behind wastewater treatment facilities to capture phosphorous and nitrogen — essential algae nutrients that otherwise need to come from petroleum."

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